In the northern hemisphere, it’s winter. Really. Here’s today’s winter storm warning for the New York City area, as composed by the bards of the US government’s NOAA National Weather Service:

SNOW…TRANSITIONS TO A WINTRY MIX OF SLEET…SNOW AND FREEZING RAIN AROUND MID MORNING…AND CONTINUES FOR MUCH OF THE DAY BEFORE BECOMING A PERIOD OF FREEZING DRIZZLE AND LIGHT SLEET THIS EVENING. A HEAVY MIX OF SNOW…SLEET AND FREEZING RAIN THEN DEVELOPS OVERNIGHT…LIKELY CHANGING TO ALL FREEZING RAIN WEDNESDAY MORNING…BEFORE GRADUALLY CHANGING TO RAIN BY WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON. THERE IS STILL SOME UNCERTAINTY ON THE EXACT TIMING OF CHANGEOVER WEDNESDAY…WHICH WILL HAVE AN IMPACT ON ICING AMOUNTS.

Feed that into a text to speech engine, sample it, add some absurdly long-tailed reverbs to a couple of sparse sparkling figures and lonely, symmetrical drums and you have an IDM hit on your hands.

Winter for me is a great time to listen to and make music, watching spirals of snow and sleet blow against my fifth-floor window. Canadian Mark Templeton has produced a wintry mix of his own with an extended ambient set for our friends at Percussion Lab radio. I could describe it, but it’s just too easy. Crackling layer of frost on a glacier in an ice storm of timbre blah blah blah. It’s beautiful.

Mark Templeton Winter Mix 2011 [Free download/stream from Percussion Lab]

It’s also worth another listen to Mark’s 2009 Sea Point EP. He’s a member of the small, tightly-curated stable of artists on Anticipate Records with Morgan Packard, Ezekiel Honig, and others.

My other choice in recent days, perfect for coding a new project in one of our string of snowstorms, is one of my favorite releases of 2009, Tim Hecker’s expansive LP “An Imaginary Country.” (available from many, many sources) It really does provide the sense of traversing a far-off land, an ambient outing that’s anything but featureless.

Official site:
http://www.sunblind.net/

Here’s what Robert Henke, Monolake and Ableton co-founder, had to say about winter to CDM:

In Berlin winter,
there are only two possibilities.
One: go with it, by creating cold,
icy wavetable sounds with low bit
resolution. No chorus! Avoid ‘nice’
chord progressions. C-minor on
a low octave is never wrong. If
melodies are a must, make sure
to have falling motives. Think
snowflakes, think rain and dirt! A
slight touch of melancholy also
can’t hurt. If creating your own
little glacier fails, put Joy Division
MP3s in your playlist.
Or, alternatively, create analog
warmth as compensation. Does
not need to be real analog; it
is only important that the user
interface provides you with some
visual clues of warmth. Wood
panels, warm color scheme,
vintage looking knobs. Add
reverb with chorus and a crackle
loop from an old record.
Talking about old records, it
cannot get warmer then witht
he fantastic new Honest Jones
Records release, “Springs of
Time”, a collection of 78s from the
EMI archive. Oldest possible vinyl.
Alcohol also helps, but I heard
there are minors visiting this
website, so stay away from that;
drink Tea.

What does winter (or summer, southern Hemisphere) mean for your music listening and production? What’s on your playlist or in your studio at the moment? Let us know.

It’s winter in the Northern Hemisphere. For some of us, there’s little need to remind us of snow and ice. But if you fancy adding some frozen sounds to your music, we have both free samples and expert recording tips to help get your cold on.

Frank Bry, a master sound designer, apparently has plenty of access to snow in his home of Idaho, but that hasn’t dampened his enthusiasm for the white, fluffy stuff. He’s devoted an entire library to Ultimate Snow with some 300 locations. You can read an interview with him on the superb field recording site Sonic Terrain:

Recording Snow Sounds: An Exclusive Interview with Frank Bry

Now he’s back at it again, turning his attention to capturing the sound of snow falling from giant fir trees, as they shed the weight of the snowfall. He employs patience, ingenuity, and some serious recording gear. The results from the end of November:
Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow (also via Sonic Terrain)

Snow Falling Off Trees 2010 by therecordist

If you prefer to use snow and ice for more directly musical purposes, the good folks at sample house Tonehammer have a massive collection of wintry wonders to give away. The 2009 edition is back as a mass-download (WAV/Kontakt/SFZ), and 2010 brings a new sample each day through December 25, advent calendar-style. It’s like a big box of Turkish Delight.

2009 includes drums made from snow sounds, and percussion produced by throwing stones on ice. There are other, non-precipitation entries, too, including a Gnomish Choir (Helium Choir) and toy glockenspiel.

The Bedroom Producers Blog can get you connected with this and many other freebies:

Gnomehammer Samples Free Until December 25th!

And if all of this has made you feel a chill, warm up with a free Windows VST warmth/saturation plug-in from the same site.

That’s the question I ask at the beginning of the Create Digital Music Winter 08 guide. We’ve filled it with good stuff we love, plus good stuff we hear that you love (via our survey of hundreds of readers for the holiday guide). Via Creative Commons-licensed images, you’ve shared your world of music, and so we share the whole guide as fully free work (it’s got a CC Attribution / ShareAlike license).

Here’s some of what’s inside – we wanted stories that you’d want to live with the whole winter season:

• Circuit bending 101 with Michael Una
• Imagining synths: reflections on the design of electronic instruments with Dan McPharlin, creator of wonderful miniature synths handmade from cardboard
• Tutorial on slicing audio to MIDI in Ableton Live 7, with tips from Live guru Francis Preve plus a free accompanying CDM pack designed by Covert Operators at http://covops.org/cdm
• Holiday Guide, with your favorite gear and software of the year, listening and reading suggestions, and ideas on open hardware from monome creator Brian Crabtree
• Creative tips for surviving winter in Berlin, courtesy monolake (Robert Henke)
• Images from the CDM community and beyond

With the help of graphic editor Nathanael Jeanneret, the results are designed to be an object on paper or read on high-resolution displays. The PDF is available free, with an on-demand print version from Lulu available worldwide (US$19.99 before shipping). I just ordered my print copy rush, so I’ll let you know what it looks like as this is the first time we’ve tried this.

Print Edition + Free PDF Download @ Lulu.com

A big thanks to our sponsors for making this possible:

Ableton Live, our premiere sponsor; now with an unlimited 14-day trial

Audiofile Engineering, makers of Wave Editor for Mac

Highly Liquid DIY MIDI electronics maker

Covert Operators, creators of Live Packs and video tutorials for Ableton Live

I’m really eager to hear what you think.

(No need to adjust your set: that opening is silent, as I expect the Rothera Research Station is sometimes.)

It’s all another reminder that musical ideas are all around you, wherever you may be — and sometimes it’s very good to get away from the computer screen.

Also, to those of you constantly complaining about the weather in Berlin – considered Antarctica?